Classification of Low-Level Atmospheric Structures Based on a Pyramid Representation and a Machine Learning Method

The atmosphere is a highly complex fluid system where multiple intrinsic and extrinsic phenomena superpose at same spatial and temporal dominions and different scales, making its characterization a challenging task. Despite the novel methods for pattern recognition and detection available in the literature, most of climate data analysis and weather forecast rely on the ability of specialized personnel to visually detect atmospheric patterns present in climate data plots. This paper presents a method for classifying low-level wind flow configurations, namely: confluences, difluences, vortices and saddle points. The method combines specialized image features to capture the particular structure of low-level wind flow configurations through a pyramid layout representation and a state-of-the-art machine learning classification method. The method was validated on a set of volumes extracted from climate simulations and manually annotated by experts. The best results into the independent test dataset was 0.81 of average accuracy among the four atmospheric structures.